Smells pretty good. Will report on performance.
I been thinking again, and sometimes when I do that my brain gets stuck on questions I cant answer…
Given that the original Gillette blade was – among other differences – noticeable thicker and therefore more rigid than today’s blades, and that perceived blade aggressiveness is often linked to blade exposure and angle… would an old razor (like, say, a Gillette Old Type from 1918) shave and feel any different back then compared to these days?
King Gillette’s original patent do state the following:
The blade of my razors made of’ sheet steel having preferably a uniform thickness of about six one-thousandths of an inch.
Or in measures more easy to understand; 6/1000″ = 0.1524 mm.
A fair bit of digging online seems to indicate that modern blades are about 0.10 mm thick, or about 2/3rds as thick as the old blade – assuming, off course, that the original blade was as thick as the patent calls for. It’s hard to tell exactly when blades got thinner, but over on another forum I spotted one guy claiming that
[blades] became a lot thinner after that; I have seen blades from the 50’s and 60’s that went from 0.10 to 0.08 and even 0.06mm.
For all I know the increased thinness of the blades could have started sooner, the the modern shape and perforation of the DE blades seems to have appeared around 1930. Going by the patent numbers listed on a US Gillette Blue from 1935, it’s hard to tell… several references to “thin, flexible blade”, but nothing on just HOW thin it is.
When I raised this question on my favourite shave forum, the guy making my preferred aftershave pointed out that he likes SE razors due to their thicker, stiffer blades – which like DE blades used to be even thicker and therefore even stiffer – since they flexes less. I should probably get my callipers out to measure a new and old SE blade, just to see how pronounced the difference really is.
Stiffening of a blade can also be achieved by twisting it in a slant razor, and slants are often considered to be more “aggressive”… even if I personally don’t think my slants are aggressive, just efficient – perhaps aggressive is the wrong term, even if it’s commonly used to denote the opposite of a mild razor.
Making a number of wild assumptions, desperately pulling on what I learned in structural mechanics more than two decades ago, and hoping that this website have got their code right; the old blade ought to be twice as stiff as the current blades – with the biggest caveat being that the modulus of elasticity is the same for the steels used.
These guys offers (or at least offered) three hole blades that are a dimensional match for the pre-1929 Gillette blade… and it seems that one of the thickness’s they offer match the old blades. But the blades are made for cutting plastic film, so they will probably be rotten for shaving with.
After all that searching and math, I still have no real idea how a blade twice as stiff would affect the behaviour of an Old Style Gillette… Combining what what we know about SE razors and their stiffer blades with what we know about the torsionally stiffened blades in slants, I’m leaning towards the idea that the Old Type Gillettes using the pre-1929 blades may have been more aggressive than they are with the thinner blades of today.
I may be wrong though, with all the assumptions and guestimates underpinning that idea.
Again a few photos I found online; this time of a glass shaving bowl/scuttle of a design I’ve never seen before. As far as I can tell it’s a vintage item, but it must have been an unusual design even back when since I’ve not seen anything even remotely like it before.
The possibility do off course exist that the site I found it on is simply wrong, and that its intended use was not shaving… but if so, I have even less of a clue what it might be for.
A poster / advertisement for shaving brushes I found online, age unknown. The similarities with the brushes from the US Civil War I posted last week should be obvious; high loft, a ‘neck’ between the handle and the brush proper, and in some cases the use of string to secure the knot.
At the same time we can see the development of the modern brush; shorter loft, use of rubber cement and glue to secure the knot, and less pronounced necking.
Some more photos of old shave gear I found online, this time brushes from around the time of the US Civil War. Three things that strikes me right off the bat is the use of string or twine to secure the knot, the length of knot in relation to the diameter, and the narrow neck between the knot and the handle.
Just a bunch of photos I’ve found online… the design of the mugs are interesting, with a “side pocket” to hold soap and other gear. Some seem to have a soap cup that fitted in the top as well.
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From time to time I have fun looking through old patents… it is admitedly an odd intererst, but the ingeuity of people never fails to amuse and amaze me.
Today I found a patent for a disposable razor from 1945 – quite possible one of the earliest patents for a disposable – and the resons that Mr Albert D Brown gave for coming up with the idea is quite valid even today:
My invention relates to an improvement in shaving devices or safety razors, and has for one purpose to provide a dispensable razor or shaver.
Another purpose is to provide a razor or shaver adapted for a quick and emergency shave for those who find themselves without the usual shaving facilities.
Another purpose is to provide a packaged shaver which includes or carries enough brushless cream for one shave.
Another purpose is to provide an improved package assembly for dispensable shavers.
While the shape Mr Brown came up with perhaps isn’t the most ergonomic of shapes for a razor, I do like the way he carried a small tube of brushless cream inside the handle.
Mr Brown also went a step further than just designing the razor though; he also planned for and patented how to pack, ship, and display in shops his new invention – as well as giving a detailed explanation on the use of his disposable razor:
The abovedescribed container is so proportioned that it can be stacked in pairs, each pair forming together a rectangular body as shown at small a, small b of Fig. 4. As many pairs as desired, arranged to form such rectangular bodies, may be stacked or packaged in a large container. In Fig. 4 I illustrate six containers arranged in three pairs, which, after being stacked or assembled, may be packaged or handled as a larger unit Also they may be loosely stacked, as shown in Fig. 4, for handy disposition in a show case or on a counter.
The inside curved surface 6, 1 provides an efficient resting place for the second joint of the second finger, the thumb and index finger, grasping the ends of the body I. For shaving the upper lip downwardly the handle portion 4 of the body may be grasped with the thumb on the convex side and the index and second finger on the concave side. For shaving upwardly the shaver body is inverted and theindex finger is placed on the concave curved portion 6, I with the thumb and second finger grasping the ends of the body. Thus, I have provided a simple, small, compact shaving body which is adapted for shaving in a variety of directions…
As I’m sure a lot of you in the wetshaving community are aware of by now Italian Barber have put on the marked a stainless steel razor – called the Mamba – that retails for a hair under 50$… a move that have made some people on the forums question the price point of other stainless razors as well as implying that other manufacturers and vendors are pushing prices up to increase their profit.
To me the last bit sounded like what grass turns into after passing through a bovine… I’ve been privileged enough to be allowed to “peek past the curtain” as it where in my chats with people who have designed, crafted and made razors, and none of them strikes me as people who push prices up for the hell of it – price is always been driven by costs, and the cost of machining have always been on the top of their heads. So I decided to look a bit more into the implied claims and what drives the price of machined razors.
I’ve spent an rather informative evening reading up on the costs of machining, which seems to be somewhat of an black art even to experienced machinists as far as I can tell. The major cost drivers are the programming and setting up of the machine, followed by the time it takes to change tools, and then the time to machine each piece. Actual cost of material is far down the list, even if the choice of material affects both the time to machine and how often one much replace tools.
Looking at the Mamba, it’s fairly obvious to me that it’s been designed to be easy to program into a CNC machine – lathe or mill – and require a minimum of actual machining thus cut down on the time to machine each piece as well as making the tools last longer between each change.
Take for instance the handle. It’s made in two pieces, meaning that the handle and the end cap can be turned from a round bar only fractionally larger than the finished product. The handle is made of just
one cove cut, nine straight cuts, two drilled and tapped holes. The end cap is also a fairly simple shape, requiring some knurling, a 45° cut, a straight cut and cutting some screw threads.The result is a handle that is as cheap as you can make them, even if it looks boring and pedestrian to me – arguable a subjective opinion, and your mileage may vary on that.
Same with the baseplate – straight lines and simple curves for the most part. Notice the counter boring around the blade alignment pins; this allows for a much quicker and thus cheaper machining operations of said pins than if the curved surface would have come all the way up to the pins.
In my quick and dirty analysis it’s only the top plate that strikes me as being slightly tricky to program and machine, and that is only because of the screw-post – where one can see the same style counter boring as we noticed on the base plate. The rest of the top plate again features simple straight lines and curves.
The choice of material for the Mamba – 316L alloy as opposed to something like 17-4, in other words a softer stainless austenite steel and not an inherently harder stainless martensite steel – might also be driven by the fact that 316L is easier to machine and wears less on the tools. The trade off is off course that scratch resistance will be lower, and on the large open surfaces of this design any scratch will be noticeable.
To wrap up the manufacture all parts of the Mamba is machine finished – not that there is anything wrong with that – thus saving time and cost when compared to hand finishing and polishing.
So there you have it. As far as I can tell the Mamba is a razor designed from the outset to be as cheap as possible to machine in bulk – according to Italian Barber the initial production run was 1200 – and therefore it is looking like it was designed to be cheap to machine in bulk. It may or may not be a decent shaver, but it looks pretty pedestrian in my eyes next to more ornate and intricate stainless razors designs such as the Asylum Evolution, the Timeless, the Barbaros TR-2, the upcoming Paradigm, and any number of more expensive stainless steel razors.
Please note that Jason, aka Boonie21, have a similar analysis of the Mamba’s price point in a post over at my favourite wetshaving forum – but his analysis have the benefit of drawing directly from his own experience of designing a razor.
So sidetrack for a second; there is a reason why a Mercedes-Benz A-Class costs more than a Geo Metro. They are both cars, they will both get you from A to B, but the later is designed and built to be cheap and the end user will notice the difference in build quality and driving experience. In the same way a fifty dollar stainless steel razor will look like a fifty dollar razor, without any of the luxuries – read design intricacies – of a more expensive razors.
But when all is said and done the existence of a 50$ razor in 316L does NOT mean that every other stainless steel razor is overpriced. It means that someone managed to simplify the machining of a razor enough to make a 50$ razor possible.
Total sidenote for those curious about how as 50$ stainless steel razor shaves; all reports so far states it’s mild – to the point of some being listed on the B/S/T after one or two shaves.
A local chain have started carrying this brand, and so far I’m quite satisfied with both the face cleaners, the moisturiser and the beard stuff. I’ll review each in more detail as I get around to it.
